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Americans, German win Nobel for cell transport

Images of Americans James Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-born researcher Thomas Suedhof are projected on a screen as Juleen Zierath, Karolinska Institute’s chairman of the Nobel committee for physiology or medicine, speaks Monday. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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STOCKHOLM — Americans James Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-born researcher Thomas Sudhof won the 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries on how hormones, enzymes and other key substances are transported within cells.

This traffic control system keeps activities inside cells from descending into chaos and has helped researchers gain a better understanding of a range of diseases including diabetes and disorders affecting the immune system, the committee said.

Working in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the three researchers made groundbreaking discoveries about how tiny bubbles called vesicles act as cargo carriers inside cells. Above all, their work helps explain “how this cargo is delivered to the right place at the right time” the committee said.

“Imagine hundreds of thousands of people who are traveling around hundreds of miles of streets; how are they going to find the right way? Where will the bus stop and open its doors so that people can get out?” Nobel committee secretary Goran Hansson said. “There are similar problems in the cell.”

The discoveries have helped doctors diagnose a severe form of epilepsy and immune deficiency diseases in children, Hansson said. In the future, scientists hope the research could lead to medicines against more common types of epilepsy, diabetes and other metabolism deficiencies, he added.

Rothman, 62, is a professor at Yale University, while Schekman, 64, is at the University of California, Berkeley. Sudhof, 57, joined Stanford University in 2008.

Schekman said he was awakened at 1 a.m. at his home in California by the chairman of the prize committee and was still suffering from jetlag after returning from a trip to Germany the night before.

“I wasn’t thinking too straight. I didn’t have anything elegant to say,” he told The Associated Press. “All I could say was ‘Oh my God,’ and that was that.”

He called the prize a wonderful acknowledgment of the work he and his students had done and said he knew it would change his life.

“I called my lab manager and I told him to go buy a couple bottles of Champagne and expect to have a celebration with my lab,” he said.

In the 1970s, Schekman discovered a set of genes that were required for vesicle transport, while Rothman revealed in the 1980s and 1990s how vesicles delivered their cargo to the right places. Also in the ‘90s, Sudhof identified the machinery that controls when vesicles release chemical messengers from one brain cell that let it communicate with another.

“This is not an overnight thing. Most of it has been accomplished and developed over many years, if not decades,” Rothman told the AP.

Rothman said he lost grant money for the work recognized by the Nobel committee, but he will now reapply, hoping the Nobel prize will make a difference in receiving funding.

Sudhof, who moved to the U.S. in 1983 and also has U.S. citizenship, told the AP he received the call from the committee while driving toward the city of Baeza, in southern Spain, where he was due to give a talk.

“I got the call while I was driving and like a good citizen I pulled over and picked up the phone,” he said. “To be honest, I thought at first it was a joke. I have a lot of friends who might play these kinds of tricks.”

The medicine prize kicked off this year’s Nobel announcements. The awards in physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced by other prize juries this week and next. Each prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million).

Rothman and Schekman won the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for their research in 2002 — an award often seen as a precursor of a Nobel Prize. Sudhof won the Lasker award this year.

“I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor,” he said after winning that prize. “But as a medical student I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.”

Jeremy Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, said Monday’s announcement was “long overdue” and widely expected.

That’s because the winners’ research was “so fundamental, and has driven so much other research,” he said in a telephone interview.

Berg, who now directs the Institute for Personalized Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, said the work provided the intellectual framework scientists use to study how brain cells communicate and how other cells release hormones. In both cases, vesicles play a key role by delivering their cargo to the cell surface and releasing it to the outside, he said.

So the work has indirectly affected research into virtually all neurological disease as well as other diseases, he said.

Established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the Nobel Prizes have been handed out by award committees in Stockholm and Oslo since 1901. The winners always receive their awards on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

Last year’s medicine award went to Britain’s John Gurdon and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka for their contributions to stem cell science.